Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#11

Post by __composed »

lukevp wrote: post #10

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live r…

Agreed and unfortunately Realm appears to have been acquired by mongo. No disrespect to the mongo team, but if we've learned anything from firebase it's that whenever a project like this gets acquired things get a little... shaky.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#12

Post by kiwicopple »

lukevp wrote: post #10

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live r…

Thanks for the mention lukevp.

I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast.

We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the result was a reduction from 27.9 seconds to 1.3 seconds. This is because we are building on top of Postgres. We also benchmarked our smallest servers yesterday - we were getting around 1200 reads/s on our smallest servers (FB was doing 1540 reads/s). We aim to get closer to 2K over the next 1 month and we'll publish the benchmarks.

> It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases

This is correct - it could take a few more months to get this out. Right now we're focused on stability/performance.

I'm happy to answer any other questions

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#15

Post by stephen_cagle »

Plug: I wrote a small clojurescript wrapper around firebase. You can try it out here. -> https://firemore.org/

I haven't found another solution that can get you started as quickly as Firebase can. Most common complaint I hear from developers about Firebase is the concern that Google will drop support at some point. I can't fault that concern, but Google seems to drop developer products at a much lower rate than customer products.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#16

Post by stephen_cagle »

kiwicopple wrote: post #12
lukevp wrote: post #10

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live r…

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

I am excited about this. Two questions:

1) Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database? Firebase (Firestore) claims they can do like a million concurrent connections & 10 megs per second of writes. Any idea of the scaling limits of Supabase? Totally understand if this isn't on the radar yet, it is not really a concern for most applications.

2) Do you have a built in authentication solution? One of the pleasures of Firebase is the built in authentication that mostly just works by enabling it.

Happy that you are building an alternative to Firebase.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#18

Post by kiwicopple »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #16
kiwicopple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

I am excited about this. Two questions: 1) Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database? Firebase (Firestore) claims they can do like a million concurrent connections & 10 megs per second of writes. Any idea of the scaling limits of Supabase? Totally understand if this isn't on the radar yet, it is not really a concern for most applications. 2) Do you have a built in authenticat…

> Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database?

Correct. We will soon add vertical/horizontal scaling (early next year). For concurrent connections, we use PostgREST[1] for RESTful calls, and an Elixir/Phoenix server [2] for realtime data. This reduces the number of connections to your DB, handling concurrency in the middleware. We are building the benchmarks now, but "enterprise scale" is top of mind with everything we are doing.

> Do you have a built in authentication solution?

Yes, we use GoTrue [3] for authentication, and we use Postgres Row Level Security for authorization. You can read more about it here: https://supabase.io/blog/2020/08/05/supabase-auth

[1] http://postgrest.org/en/v7.0.0/

[2] https://github.com/supabase/realtime

[3] https://github.com/netlify/gotrue

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#19

Post by tjchear »

kiwicopple wrote: post #12
lukevp wrote: post #10

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live r…

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

Is there/will there be multi-tenant support for auth in Supabase?

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#20

Post by kiwicopple »

tjchear wrote: post #19
kiwicopple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

Is there/will there be multi-tenant support for auth in Supabase?

I may have misunderstood the question so feel free to push back if this doesn't make sense -

We use Postgres Row Level (RLS) security, so you can do some very advanced rules. For example, one of our team built a social network with PG and RLS: https://github.com/steve-chavez/socnet/blob/f1abaadaaedb7c8e...

RLS is flexible enough to cover multi-tenant scenarios, though it's up to you how you structure your schema to make it work.

Post reply on HN